Planning is important so that you can define the steps you want to take in building your business. Remember above all that the business plan It should be written not only for themselves, but also for future investors who wish to acquire or invest in your company.
Don’t see planning as hard. It must be written in a conscious way, and it must be a plan that has the flexibility to be changed over time. As any seasoned entrepreneur knows, initial ideas of a company they must be able to adapt to the circumstances.
If you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup, if you put water in a bottle it becomes the bottle. Water can flow or it can crash. It is the same attitude that you should have with your initial business plan. Before making that business plan, you should know that it must include the following details:
1. Explain the purpose of the project
The first step for your business plan to be successful is to explain what you are going to do with it. After all, what is the value of your investment? Creating a project is supposed to satisfy a market need. The first part is to make a brief summary of what will appear written in the entire plan and will contain the following points:
- Justify why the customer should consider your offer
- Explain in a few words, which are your main competitors
- Explain why the market needs your project. To be more convincing, write it down if you can in figures that support your project.
- Adapt those figures in the current context
- Is it a prediction? Expand what you know about the market and how it will develop
In this part, you can translate the mission of your company. If you sell books, for example, your mission could be to sell books at a fairly low price, which makes it easy to buy books for all social classes. Basically, you have to answer this simple question: What is the purpose of creating your business?
2. SWOT analysis
This is another of the most important points. Doing a SWOT analysis implies that you know not only your business, but also your competitors and the market. In summary, it can be said that a SWOT analysis is a technique that helps you visualize some important characteristics about your business in order to give greater importance to the areas that need it most:
- Strengths: It is where all qualities are defined and strengths of your business. Think about what you will offer to the market or what you will do better than your competitors in order to reach satisfactory conclusions.
- Opportunities: Here you can search for faults that exist in the market and that you can explore. Deep down, it is realizing what people want and what they are doing wrong to take advantage of it.
- Weaknesses: As in any company, you also have weaknesses. Think that you are leaving aside, that you will need to improve and make a list here.
- Threats: This is the part that can be exploited by your competitors. If you have a poorly structured website, for example, this can be a point to be taken advantage of by your rivals so they can steal market share.
3. How will you manage your money?
All the above steps are important, but they are nothing if you can’t find one effective way to generate income. If you work as a freelancer, there is a quick fix: clients. They will be your main source of monetization and without them there is no freelance business.
However, your analysis of how to make money must go much further. Consider the following:
You need to know how you are going to get clients. The use of social networks. The sites you will use to send the products or services to your customers. Who will be your first customers.
Even if you work independently, you need to know how your billing is going to work, either using software or temporarily manually.
When you determine the way you are going to earn moneyIt is also important to put other issues on the table such as the fact that you think about other forms of monetization beyond the usual known ways.
4. Recipients
It is important that you define your target audience from the beginning. Do you need to know what type of customers you are going to have and what they will buy in most of your products (male or female), their age, their level of education or their social class. This information is especially important for investors.
5. Socioeconomic Impact
When creating a business plan, you also have to take into account the socio-economic impact that you will generate. In other words, what is going to be affected in society by this project? It could be to improve the conditions of the area in which you will venture with your company, offering a better product or service, for example.
In addition, surely you also want to create jobs in the future when your company grows. To the make your business plan, describe how the world around you will change. This point is also very important to get investors or to borrow money from a bank.
6. Competitor analysis
Here is one of the points that will take you more work to do since as the title says, in this phase you should see what the market is like and discover that you can “steal” to attract customers for your business. You must conduct a thorough investigation.
Search on Google, inquire with suppliers, look in the newspapers or take a look at social networks and do not forget that you should also be aware of your indirect competitors. For example, if you want to create a website that has economics as its main theme, sites that speak exclusively in this niche are not your only competitors. Blogs and general newspapers that also deal with economics or television programs on this subject are also your competitors, although they do so indirectly.
7. Marketing Mix
Also known as “Four Ps”, the Marketing Mix is a formula created by Jerome McCharty and whose principle is the analysis of market variants that are carried out between you and your clients. Basically everyone is interconnected and will have a great impact on your business. Let’s see how they should be analyzed:
- Product: At this point, you need to explain your product in an engaging way. This is a brief summary of the concept that you have been working on up to here.
- Price: Please explain from the beginning what your pricing policy will be and what discounts you want to make to compete.
- Square: Here, you make known the form, the place and what product or service will be offered to customers.
- Promotion: All promotional tasks that will be used to publicize your product. Basically, how you are going to impact with what you sell.
8. Necessary Human Resources
Depending on the size and characteristics of your business, you may not initially need a large human capital to work. It is important to determine in advance how many people will collaborate in your business if required, what should be their professional qualities and what will be the salary expense.
I advise you to take good care of this point and leave it last if possible, especially if it is your first business, since you will have little notion about the responsibilities and necessary payments demanded by the State, which may involve costs not considered. Always set a higher value than what you initially consider so that you do not encounter surprises later.
9. Establish a time frame for the return on investment
Everything that goes around comes around and money invested by itself should be no exception. Establish the time you want your money invested in the project to be recoverable.
Project your plan long enough until the return on investment is completed, that is, until your company reaches the breakeven point, which is the state in which the project works only to cover expenses and begins to generate profits. Remember that that moment can often take years to achieve, especially if you have resorted to some bank loan to start your own business.
As you can see, these are the essential steps to carry out a basic business plan. In this way you can answer several questions to shape and define well the ideas of what is required to give life to your business project.
I always recommend that you make your plan before proceeding to execute any business idea. This helps to clarify ideas, put plans in order and, above all, to increase your chances of success.
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